by Dan Cohen, Santa Monica Reporter
The fall harvest of stylish, English language features has begun with two releases that have found nearly universal favor with the mainstream media. But the elements that distinguish both “The Master” and “Looper” are willful idiosyncrasies that are more likely to win them cult status than year end awards.
“Looper,” the more approachable of the two, presents a dystopian view of the near future, built on a perennial sci-fi concept that was exploited with great success by “The Terminator.” As its complex narrative unspools, writer/director Rian Johnson’s vividly realized sci-fi mash up also echoes elements of “Blade Runner” and a terrific, but little scene cult movie from Spain, “Time Crimes,” which is under development as a studio production. (Note to the studio: move on–Johnson has just stolen your thunder.)
In its opening sequences “Looper” offers up a hard edged sketch of America in 2024, that plays like the warning cries of our more progressive economists. A brutish, inchoate social order has set masses of the poor and disenfranchised against an all but invisible ruling class. Joe, (Joseph Gordon Levitt,) who aspires to the upper echelon, makes his money performing executions for a venomous mob boss, played with great finesse by Jeff Daniels. Joe’s prey are other criminals, sent back from the future, where disposing a human body has become the nearest thing to impossible. Why that is, is never explained, but the premise is set up early in the movie, so you go with it. After shot-gunning his victims at close range Joe and his fellow “Loopers” immolate the remains in blast furnaces, leaving the future clean and tidy.
After efficiently but cheerlessly disposing of a succession of bound and masked bad guys from the 2070s, Joe is assigned to whack his thirty year older self, (Bruce Willis.) Since he’s been saving up for a lengthy retirement in France Joe balks at the prospect of cutting short his own future, although he’s already witnessed the disastrous results when one of his pals balks at the same assignment.
The younger Joe; Levitt, and the older Joe; Willis, can’t quite bring themselves to kill one another, and depart in different directions. Younger Joe is on the run from fellow assassins who have taken after him for failing to complete his assignment, while older Joe goes after a young man who’s destined to grow up and dispose of the entire criminal community.
Midway through its lengthy running time, close to two hours, the movie goes through a change of tone and venue, as younger Joe takes refuge with a single mother raising a little boy on a depression era farm, played in near disguise by Emily Blunt. Unbeknownst to the fugitive hit man, this little boy will have a profound impact on both the future Joe and the current one.
Writer/director Johnson has taken the elements of the movies mentioned above, along with a few others, spun them around in his centrifuge like mind, and patched them together with a vigorous visual style. Plot strands become frayed as the body count rises, (and rises,) in the first half but come together as the story moves towards the tense climax.
Had I not viewed “Timecrimes,” a week or so earlier, via the Netflix instant download feature, I might have held “Looper” in slightly higher esteem. But seeing the low budget yet resourceful Spanish import in such close proximity, left me slightly wary of Johnson’s plot machinations. It wasn’t the similarities between the two so much as their related themes. Nevertheless, there seemed just the whiff of things borrowed about the newer film.
As skillfully rigged as it is, and it’s quite extraordinary from moment to moment, “Looper” feels bifurcated. To some extent this is a function of its length. Joe’s problem isn’t stated until very late in the movie’s first half, after we’ve been treated to a lengthy succession of grisly murders and other abuses of human bodies. At this point we’ve been treated to a compelling period design, that calls out for further explanation. But the bulk of the story, when it finally accepts its mission, takes place on the farm, far from the meticulously drawn environment of the first half. The movie almost leaves its origin dangling.
Another directorial element estranged me from Joseph Levitt’s well played character. Director Johnson has chosen to alter Levitt’s face in the movies key sequences, so that he better resembles his older self, the character played by Willis. It’s no more than a flourish, but a distracting one, that when it’s introduced, leaves you scratching your head and asking yourself what happened to alter Joe’s face. The alteration occurs at a pivotal moment, when we’re asked to invest in a relationship between Blunt and Levitt that’s sketchily built, at best. This small detail makes what should have been a smooth transition lumpy.
But at just the point where the movie seems ready to choke on an over abundance of invention another character enters the mix and revives it from within; a little boy played by Pierce Gagnon, a very young and gifted child actor. In light of story elements that I hesitate to relate for spoiling an important revelation, Gagnon elevates what might have been a pedestrian device; the cute and threatened innocent, into a character true to his own internal logic. And delivers the movie from the last act doldrums.
The impassioned fan bases fired up by both “The Master” and “Looper” will probably overlap, but not by much. This latest essay on the mentor/student relationship from PT Anderson, director of “Boogie Nights” and “There Will Be Blood,” is another cultish item, in several senses, that is leaving some audiences elated, and others, thoroughly confused.
“The Master” is still playing in town, and although I saw it relatively late in its run, I believe that the controversy that has risen around it will return to haunt us at awards time. So for what it’s worth, my two cents.
In my mind, anyway, the question the movie imposes is fairly simple; is it possible for a movie to be thrilling movie making and unsteady narrative at the same time? On a scene to scene basis “The Master” comes to life on several levels. But as it settles into its later section there seems to be an almost willful reluctance on the part of writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson to develop the kind of plot turns that would take it to the level that most viewers expect from English language features.
A lengthy essay in a recent Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times described “The Master” as belonging to a recurrent trend the writer categorized as “cryptic cinema.” At the same time he tried to draw a distinction between Anderson’s latest and “The Tree of Life.” One he called a memory piece, the other a failed narrative. For me, it was the typical “distinction without a difference,” one that ultimately boils down to a matter of taste. If you like Terrence Malick’s personal memory piece you’ll probably get a kick out of Anderson’s essay on mentoring.
I didn’t find “The Master “ murky or unclear, although it willfully dispenses with the kind of back stories that would make either of the two main characters, the cult leader Lancaster Dodd, or his ambivalent student, Freddie Quell, comprehensible in terms of simple motivation. What the movie does, and does so well, is to interject us into their tumultuous lives, like a fly on the wall. And much of what we witness is startling, complicated, and compelling.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd states the case for himself in everything he says and does. He’s a driven individualist with a voracious appetite for both the physical and the ethereal, and the troubled Quell sees both in him. It would be wrong to describe the opposing elements in Dodd’s makeup as warring with one another. Quite the opposite; for better or worse Dodd revels in his contradictions. And there I think is where many people have trouble dealing with both the movie and his character.
Quell, realized with startling physical detail by Joaquin Phoenix, is deeply at odds with his contradictions. Early on, when he impulsively hops onto Dodd’s yacht he’s close to his wits end. In the simplest terms, Quell is a raging sociopath. But as he gradually comes under the influence of the so called master he is subtly transformed, (not without lapses,) into a character better equipped to cope with the conflicting impulses at his core.
The movie is hobbled, at least for my taste, in several key sequences, that begin and end in the same place, and are simply unrealized in terms of narrative. One glaring example is a picturesque scene set in the Southwest, where Dodd and Quell engage in a dangerous, high speed, motorcycle drive through the desert. The idea that they’re testing each others mettle by example is interesting, but it lacks a defining moment that would make its intentions clear. And that’s only one of several sequences that leave too many unexplored questions.
At the same time there are others that nearly explode with well defined feeling: in particular, a sequence where both Lancaster and Quell spend a night in jail. For Dodd the incident is an occupational hazard, a moment where fate has turned against him, but one that will quickly pass. For Quell, it’s a serious crisis that cuts to the quick of his fears, and brings him close self destruction. The sequence is interesting because it reveals the differences between a man who is at peace with his conduct and one who has so far been unable to reconcile his feelings with his emotions.
At the movies conclusion, and I believe it actually does conclude, Quell has arrived at a different level, and some sense of internal peace. I won’t go into that here, because I’m sure some or you would rather experience it firsthand. For others, it will seem like to little, too late; they will have already given up on the movie.
Amy Adams comes alive in a couple of strong scenes, for once playing against type. I wish she and Laura Dern, also in the supporting cast, had been given more to do here, but they do the best they can with the script. Others provide strong moments, although every human element has been arranged to complement the two leads.
Finally, Anderson has one more trick up his sleeve; crafty production design, complemented by extraordinary cinematography. To say the production design has been lovingly rendered by Director of Photography Mihai Malaimarie is to understate the case. Malaimarie’s images are literally eye opening. A European who was worked with Francis Ford Copolla, he seems to be showing us aspects of the American landscape of the mid-fifties in a way we’ve never quite seen it before.
I suppose I would be remiss for not touching on the flashpoint of Scientology, from which Anderson has supposedly taken his cues. It seems to me that the real life L. Ron Hubbard is merely a jumping off point for the fictional Lancaster Dodd. Like the period itself, his character is merely a reference point for the director, who’s spun his own, unique take on mentoring, like he’s done before in “Hard Eight,” “Boogie Nights,” and “There Will Be Blood.” Anyone looking for vindication or castigation of a particular ideology in “The Master” is advised to look elsewhere. Anderson is much more interested in the process than its medium.
